Nickel City Storm Warning (Gideon Rimes Book 3)

by Gary Earl Ross

  “I think it’s safe to say that in this crowd most of us have never been part of the Ku Klux Klan or any neo-Nazi group.”

  Laughter. More applause, brief this time.

  “That suggests we can take some measure of shared pride in our core goodness, which reflects our willingness to work hard, to take care of our loved ones, to accept our neighbors. That is one of the things most of us have in common. We were taught to share, to play nice together, to take turns, to settle our differences with measured words and not threats or violence, to feel something when someone else is hurt or upset. Empathy makes most of us better Americans. We have to be repulsed by the suffering of others. We have to have empathy even for people we dislike. Empathy is what makes us help each other in times of crisis—national or human-made disasters—often at great risk to ourselves.”

  “EMTs are on the job,” Rafael said. “I’m heading back up.”

  “Copy that,” I said. But I felt unsettled and couldn’t say why.

  “Another thing we have in common is a belief that we are better than our basest impulses. Despite moments of weakness that prove we are hopelessly human, we usually take no joy in our crueler moments. Generally, we try to do the right thing. Wishing few people ill, we care for our loved ones, help neighbors when we can, and try to make it from day to day without inflicting our worst upon the world.”

  The younger woman returned from the restroom, opening the door wide enough for me to glimpse the DPS blazers at the metal detectors out in the corridor. As the door closed, I thought of the loose end that had bothered me.

  “Raf, did the DPS guy ever get back with the AED unit?”

  “What?”

  “The defib—”

  “I know what it is, G. I needed a second to think. I didn’t see anybody with an AED. That ambulance was pretty quick.” There was a lot of static as Rafael turned to his handy-talkie and said something. Then the static stopped. “No, the guy never got back.”

  “Heads up, everybody,” I said. “Our target may be in a DPS blazer.”

  “We do thorough background checks on our people,” Matt said, his irritation plain.

  “I checked everybody with DPS,” Cissy added. “They’re clean.”

  “I didn’t say he was your guy, Matt. I said he might be in one of your blazers.”

  “In short, as Americans we are flawed but always seeking our better selves. All in all we are pretty good, better than the worst of the rotten apples among us. Let this conference be the starting point for a restoration of the true American Way. Let the discussions we’ve had the past few days lead to a blending of ideas, to compromises that give everyone a place at the table and everyone a stake in personal responsibility. That’s where evolution is taking us, if we let it. Toward the hopeful, peaceful democracy we all deserve. Yes, America was born in blood, but it’s our responsibility to make sure it doesn’t die that way. Thank you.”

  The standing ovation was thunderous as Drea stepped back and James hopped up on the stage. He embraced Drea with his free arm and kissed her cheek. Releasing her, he put the package in his left hand atop her papers on the lectern. Then he adjusted the microphone for his height and tried to say something. His words were lost amid the applause, so he waited and pulled Drea to his side.

  That’s when I saw the drone descending from above.

  36

  “Max!” The applause drowned out my shout as I pushed through the crowd toward the stage.

  “I see it, G! I see it!”

  The UAV was small but I was still too far away to guess its size or determine whether it was black or dark blue. A few fingers shot up and pointed to it as Pete threw Drea to the stage and covered her body with his own. The drone dropped in front of James’s face and hovered there for a second before it wobbled and then rose straight up.

  “Got it.” There was no excitement in Travis’s voice, only uncertainty.

  Twenty feet above the stage the drone stopped, zipped sideways toward a wall, and dropped out of sight behind the tables along that wall. Before I could determine where it had touched down, there was an explosion from the floor that blew over tables and turned applause into screams. Caught in the sudden stampede toward the doors, I grabbed the back of a chair to keep from being knocked over. My earbud throbbed with unintelligible voices.

  “Quiet!” I screamed as people pushed past me. “Pete! Ramos! Safe room, now!”

  “Copy that!” Pete replied as Ramos, on his knees, looked toward me from the stage. I saw James Torrance sitting beside the overturned lectern as if he had stumbled into it and gone down with it.

  Ramos helped Pete to his feet and they both got Drea up. As people bottlenecked at the doors across the hall from the stage, Pete led Drea and Ramos to the curtains at the back of the stage and slipped behind them. Meanwhile, voices flooded back into my ears: “What the fuck!” “Was that a bomb?” “Anybody hurt?” Yvonne. Cissy. Matt or Mark, I couldn’t tell. “People are hurt down there,” Travis said. “They need medical now, Raf.” A moment later Pete crackled through. “Room enough in here for two. I’m locking Ramos and Drea inside. Manuel, don’t open this door for anybody but me or Gideon.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Heading your way, G,” Pete said.

  Against the wall perpendicular to the stage, several tables and chairs were on their sides. I saw bodies on the floor, some not moving, others writhing in pain, and a few trying to crawl away through broken china and spatters of uneaten food. I shouldered my way toward them.

  “Raf, can you hear me!”

  “EMTs on the way,” he said.

  “Lock down the hotel! The guy who did this has gotta be inside!”

  The drone had come down behind a cluster of tables and left a blast radius of about fifteen feet. Several tables were on their sides, whether from the blast or from the scramble of diners I could not tell. I heard crying and whimpering. More than a dozen people were on the floor, covered with food and bleeding. Among them were Bobby, Kayla, and Sam, whom I went to first. All were stunned and blinking and had small lacerations on their hands and arms. Bobby was on his back, a small cut on his cheek and his glasses nowhere to be seen. Kayla was on her side, blood trickling from one nostril, her glasses askew, and her blouse stained with the strawberry jam she always put on her toast. Glasses gone, left eye and cheek covered with blood, Sam was on his back, staring at the ceiling with the other eye. They had been close enough to the explosion that I imagined their ears must still be ringing.

  I knelt beside my godfather and squeezed his hand, relieved he squeezed back. “Help’s on the way,” I said. “Can you hear me?”

  Bobby squeezed my hand again. Kayla nodded. Sam turned his eye to me. “Drea?”

  “Safe,” I said. “Stay put while I check on other people.”

  “And miss the shuttle to the casino?” Bobby said weakly.

  I smiled and said, “I love you, Bobby,” before moving to the next table.

  Pete joined me beside Ann Marie Marciniak and told her to lie still as I pressed a cloth napkin to the gash in her thigh. The wound was not arterial but deep enough she still needed pressure applied until paramedics reached her. Also, she was lucky whatever had caused the injury didn’t appear to be inside. Bart Novak’s suit was covered with juice and food but he had no visible injuries. Unhurt but disheveled, Mayor Green and Judge Chancellor came up behind me and asked how they could help. I showed Ophelia how to hold the librarian’s wound closed while keeping pressure on it and told the judge he could relieve her if her fingers cramped. Meanwhile, Pete checked on the Lockwoods and the others at the table and announced their injuries were superficial.

  We went to the next table, RESERVED #7. The metal legs had splintered from the blast, which explained some of the shrapnel-like wounds I had seen so far. The table had flipped, covering Matt Donatello’s wife and their twins. Sharon and at least one of her sons were crying beneath it. Pete and I eased the table off them. He knelt to check their injuries
as I pivoted the table, now on its edge, to the wall.

  “Matt, main hall ASAP,” I said. “Your family’s hurt but alive.”

  I heard the big man swallow. “On my way!”

  Then I stepped over to the other two who had been seated at RESERVED #7, Randall Torrance and Chelsea Carpenter. Randall was dead, his face dotted with cuts and one side of his chest blown open—as if he had attempted to throw his body on the drone but hadn’t been quick enough. Carpenter was still alive but twitching, thick red hair fanning out beneath her head like a matted halo and her chin ripped open in a horizontal flap that suggested the metal-covered edge of the flipping table had given her the mother of all uppercuts. Before I knelt beside her, I could see most of the trauma was below her waist. Her legs were gashed, slashed, shredded. Blood pumping out of a tear in her right inner thigh told me her femoral artery was damaged. The two cloth napkins I pressed into the wound soaked through fast. I wadded three others I could reach into another makeshift compress and replaced the first, pushing hard enough to make her cry out in pain. Holding the rapidly reddening napkins in place with my right hand, I took hold of her trembling right hand with my left.

  “Help is coming, Chelsea,” I said. “Try to hold on.”

  Shivering and wincing at the pressure, she looked at me, looked past me, and half smiled, white teeth stained red. “It’s checkmate, Rimes,” she murmured. “S’what I get.”

  “What?”

  Her breathing was ragged, slowing. “Hated him for Willa—” Then the breath went out of her but her eyes held me for a long moment before their light followed.

  When I stood, I was surprised to see James Torrance coming up behind me, tears streaming down his face as Marlo Vassi clutched his arm.

  37

  “Matt! Sergeant Piñero!” Mark was almost breathless. “One of our people found our man Ferguson dead in a storage room off the west end of the shopping concourse. DPS personnel will be standing outside till police get down here. I’m on my way to your current location. Rimes, looks like you were right.”

  “Jesus!” Matt said, the voice in my earbud a half-echo of his actual voice nearby.

  “Detectives will be there in a couple minutes, Mr. Donatello,” Rafael said, his double voice even more disconcerting because he was closer to me. “They’ll secure things for the CSU. But we got the place locked down. Nobody in, nobody out. With two dead here and one where you are, this hotel is a bombing and triple homicide crime scene. We got people at every exit. He won’t get out.”

  “They,” I said. “At least two guys. Wally Ray and Stanley Maxwell, AKA Duke.”

  “Mark, we ought to try Protocol Thirty-one.” The quiver in Matt’s voice, probably a mixture of exhaustion and relief, had nothing to do with the earbud.

  “Good idea,” Mark said. “I’ll activate it on the way. Got another idea too.”

  I was in the main hall, standing between Rafael and Travis. Less than ten feet away, Matt and Sharon were seated in chairs, each embracing a twelve-year-old too big for a lap, but neither parents nor children seemed ready to part. Bobby and Kayla were in other chairs, drinking from plastic water bottles as an EMT evaluated them. Elsewhere, firefighters and paramedics were treating cuts and abrasions. Those few with more serious shrapnel injuries, like Ann Marie Marciniak and Sam, who had glass in one eye, were already on their way to area hospitals. Unhurt conference attendees staying in the hotel had been told to return to their rooms and lock their doors. Those without rooms were milling about, chatting, staring at cell phones, leaning back in chairs and closing their eyes. Judge Chancellor was giving a statement to a detective. Mayor Green and Marlo Vassi were seated on either side of James Torrance, comforting him. Nearby were the covered bodies of his son and Chelsea Carpenter, whose red hair spilled past the edge of the tablecloth atop her. I looked at her hair, thinking.

  “Big ass hotel for a room-to-room search,” Cissy said, pulling me out of my thoughts.

  “That’s why I want you to keep looking at the monitors,” I said. “Tucker might know our suite number, so keep the Brink’s bar under the doorknob and stuff towels in the crack at the bottom. To keep him from sliding something inside.”

  “We’re okay. Pete and Manuel are here with us while Drea rests,” Cissy said.

  “But an envelope with white powder that might be poison could force you all into the hallway. Block the damn door!”

  “She’s got it,” Yvonne said. “Do what you need to do but come running if you hear gunshots on seventeen. Pete’ll need help. Meanwhile, I’ll increase camera rotation rates.”

  “Good. Thanks.”

  “Our folks are checking their monitors too,” Matt called over to me, his voice still fluttery. “But these guys could find a way to wait us out.”

  “What about a special message on hotel TVs?” I called back. “Along with mugshots.”

  “Way ahead of you,” Yvonne said. “Mark texted me access. I’m prepping one now.”

  Matt looked at me with undisguised surprise, and I gave him a thumbs-up.

  A three-note tone rang over the sound system, followed by another, slightly different.

  “Our alert,” Mark said. “It tells our employees to take a subtle action a non-employee won’t know. I’ll explain in person when I get there. Sergeant, your people need to know not to let these guys get too close. Ferguson was stabbed with a nasty knife.”

  “A Wasp?” Rafael said. “We took one off the guys who broke into the Bishop place.”

  “So you know injection knives,” Mark said. “For divers in shark zones and special ops who need a silent kill. Stab deep, press a button, and a huge CO2 ball forms in the body to freeze and crush internal organs. Ferguson’s belly was ruptured. His skin was cold to the touch.”

  “Jesus God!” Travis said, thumbing her handy-talkie. “Do we shoot on sight?”

  As Rafael shook his head, I went to the Donatellos and didn’t hear what Travis told police. Apart from minor cuts and scratches, Matt’s family was fine. Sharon, a tall woman with wide shoulders and black hair, had stopped crying but her makeup was streaked. Casey and Conrad sipped sodas someone had got from a vending machine. Tie undone and blazer shrugged onto the back of his chair, Matt looked more shaken than anyone. I placed a hand on his shoulder, squeezed gently. He shook his head and let out a sigh.

  “I know you and Randall were close,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “It was Uncle Randy’s quick thinking that saved our lives,” Sharon said. “When whatever this thing was dropped to the floor, he tried to throw himself on it, maybe to save his lady friend, maybe all of us.” She kissed the forehead of the twin on her lap—Casey, I thought but wasn’t sure. “He sacrificed himself.”

  “Uncle Randy,” Matt said softly, looking at his sons and then up at me. “That’s what good uncles do, look out for people who love them. Rimes, thanks for helping Sharon.”

  I nodded and said he was welcome. “When you’re cleared, take your family home. Anything else the police need I’ll handle with your brother.”

  “Damn right,” Mark said, crossing to us. I didn’t hear him in my ear, which meant he had switched off his earbud power pack. He kissed Sharon’s cheek and looked into each nephew’s face before he went to Matt. “Thank God you’re all okay.”

  Matt slid Conrad off his lap so he could stand and embrace his brother. “He took the blast for them,” he said, eyes filling. “Randall took the blast.”

  Mark patted his twin’s back for a moment. “I know, bro, I know. But Rimes is right. Once they finish with you, go take the rest of the day.” He stepped back. “In fact, why don’t you go now? I’ll clear it with Sergeant Piñero. He can interview all you guys tomorrow, at home on Sunday. This investigation won’t be settled overnight.”

  “What about Protocol Thirty-nine?”

  “We’ll handle it without you. You have a family to take care of. They’re all you need to worry about tonight.” Mark urged Matt back into his chair. “Now let me
explain things to Rimes and the police.”

  I shook Matt’s hand and waved to Sharon before Mark pulled me back to Rafael, Travis, and the small cluster of cops conferring with them.

  “Power packs off,” Mark said, pulling Rafael and Travis aside. “No eavesdroppers.”

  Rafael and Travis exchanged a look and hit the OFF switches on their belt units.

  “Why I texted Yvonne,” Mark said. “Better to be sure. Ferguson’s jacket is missing so we can assume one of the bombers is wearing it, even if it hangs loose. Ferguson was big. Retired Rochester PD. He was good. Had to be two of them, one to distract, one to stab.”

  Rafael took out his toothpick. “Sons of bitches!”

  “Like a hospital or an old fashioned department store, we communicate with our people through coded tones,” Mark continued. “You heard three a few seconds ago, like the old NBC call sign. That was a signal to all DPS employees to move their nameplates from their breast pockets a couple inches over to the left lapel. It’s a code that we have a serious situation. It tells people coming on duty to buckle in for something out of the ordinary. The second tone means limit comms to text messages.”

  “Smooth move,” Travis said. “The perps won’t know that, which means the guy in the jacket will stand out to everyone looking for him.”

  “Exactly.” Mark pulled out his cell phone. “Now we wait.”

  “Our cops won’t know either,” Rafael said. “They’ll give a pass to all your people in blazers. We should—”

  “No!” Mark said. “Your channel could be monitored too. If everybody points to them at once, they could set off a backup explosion or worse. My people have orders to watch, not interfere. They’ll pass along location information till we’ve got the best place to box them in. When I get the alert, you two follow me and Rimes.”

  The first sighting of someone non-compliant with name badge placement came five minutes later, about two minutes after every flat screen in sight displayed a mugshot alert. The message to Mark’s mobile was followed by a second and a third verifying the neglectful employee’s identity. Mark’s frown said whoever had forgotten to move his ID badge would be reprimanded if not fired. The fourth message hit the phone less than thirty seconds later.